250 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



he is rather a dull dog, at all events deficient in the 

 finer, more attractive qualities. Leaving aside the 

 spiritual part, he is a good all-round man, tough and 

 stubborn, one the naturalist may have no secret qualms 

 about in treating as an animal. A being of strong 

 animal nature, and too often in this brewer-ridden 

 county a hard drinker. A very large proportion of the 

 men in rural towns and villages with blotchy skins and 

 watery or beery eyes are of this type. Even more 

 offensive than the animality, the mindlessness, is that 

 flicker of conscious superiority which lives in their 

 expression. It is, I fancy, a survival of the old instinc- 

 tive feeling of a conquering race amid the conquered. 



Nature, we know, is everlastingly harking back, but 

 here in Hampshire I cannot but think that this type, 

 in spite of its very marked characters, is a very much 

 muddied and degenerate form. One is led to this 

 conclusion by occasionally meeting with an individual 

 whose whole appearance is a revelation, and strikes the 

 mind with a kind of astonishment, and one can only 

 exclaim there is nothing else to say Here Nature 

 has at length succeeded in reproducing the pure un- 

 adulterated form ! Such a type I came upon one 

 summer day on the high downs east of the Itchen. 



He was a shepherd, a young fellow of twenty, about 

 five feet eight in height, but looking short on account of 

 his extraordinary breadth of shoulders and depth of 

 chest. His arms were like a blacksmith's, and his legs 

 thick, and his big head was round as a Dutch cheese. 



